arcade lightguns with Mame?

[exibar]

Ok, I know that I can just go ahead and purchase an Act-Labs lightgun and try and live with that really really ugly looking thing and not be able to shoot off screen to re-load (not a real big deal though), but what I'd really really like to do is use an actual arcade lightgun for my Mame Cab.  Has anyone done this before?  That's what I'd really like to do.  

I have a Beast-Busters 3 player game that I've restored and my son and I really enjoy playing.  I have a couple spare guns for it, and a gun for Mechanized attack as well.  I'm sure I can't use those spare guns, but perhaps one of the guns could be sacraficed for it's case... or perhaps I'd just by an airsoft gun, split that in half and use that as the case for the ACT-Labs ray gun looking gun....

   The Lik-Sang lightgun at least looks real enough for me to actually put on my cab, but the Act-Labs gun would be split open and a new case would be put on it before it gets installed....  I like the accuracy of the Act-Labs gun, but really don't like the looks of it.  Has anyone split an actlabs gun apart to mod it to look better?

  Any opinions either way with how to approach the light gun issue?  I'm almost done building my MAME cab out of a 4 way NEO-GEO cabinet with a nicely tuned 25" monitor that I'm quite happy about.

  thanks all!
    Mike B

[SirPoonga]

I posted a link in the main forum about a possible way of hooking up an arcade gun to a PC.  However it is expensive and untested.  Need a guinea pig

[menace]

Just to correct: you can reload by shooting off screen with the act labs gun in area 51 and max force (i think others)  Also, I thought it was ugly at first but it FEELS good when you use, making it more useable IMHO--good weight, good grip, excellent accuracy.  I have no regrets on buying 2 of them.

[exibar]

Just to correct: you can reload by shooting off screen with the act labs gun in area 51 and max force (i think others)  Also, I thought it was ugly at first but it FEELS good when you use, making it more useable IMHO--good weight, good grip, excellent accuracy.  I have no regrets on buying 2 of them.

Hmmmm.... Is the ACTLABS gun easy to setup?  I'm using an ATI card with a hacked VGA cable instead of going the ArcadeVGA route.  

   I'd really like to have a lightgun in that cab :-)

 Mike B

[menace]

I'm not 100% sure but I think having the AVGA is a pre-requisite for the act-labs guns--if not for the hardware, then the software.  The nice thing about the AVGA is you can run whatever build of mame you want and let the video card worry about the resolutions etc.  For example, If you are using advmame, i'm not sure if you can configure it for multiple mice as you can with Analog+ mame (although i hope someone who has advanced advmame knowledge will pipe up)

You'll notice I made alot of assumptions about what you are running--if you want to clarify what you have I could be more specific...

[jerryjanis]

I'm not 100% sure but I think having the AVGA is a pre-requisite for the act-labs guns--if not for the hardware, then the software.

From what I have read here, the AVGA is NOT a pre-requisite for the act-labs guns.  Even with an Arcade Monitor, any video card should work as long as your vga cable hack doesn't splice the hsync and vsync.  I haven't tested it myself so I could be wrong also.

[Goz]

Just to correct: you can reload by shooting off screen with the act labs gun in area 51 and max force (i think others)  Also, I thought it was ugly at first but it FEELS good when you use, making it more useable IMHO--good weight, good grip, excellent accuracy.  I have no regrets on buying 2 of them.

Hmmmm.... Is the ACTLABS gun easy to setup?  I'm using an ATI card with a hacked VGA cable instead of going the ArcadeVGA route.  

   I'd really like to have a lightgun in that cab :-)

 Mike B

 The ACT-LABS USB Gun is incredibly easy to setup. I use mine with an arcade monitor and an AVGA card in XP. XP sees the device automagically as a mouse so there are no drivers to load. You might have to watch the video a couple of time in order to properly calibrate the gun, but thats a minor inconvenience.

-Goz

[shmokes]

Video?  My guns didn't come with a calibration video.  I want to see it.

No the AVGA is not a prerequisite for the Act-Labs gun.  The TV-guns (which support dual guns out of the box) will work with pretty much any video card with an S-Video output and the regular USB guns will work with a regular old video-card.